Killed by the job Premium

Tragic story of sanitation worker's death highlights risks faced by workers in Kerala's waste management system.

Inextricably linked to the memories of Koshy and Jessy about their brother N.Joy are images of him wading through powerful currents of water. Sitting inside Koshy’s house at Marayamuttom, on the outskirts of rural Thiruvananthapuram, Jessy remembers how he used to swim fearlessly in the Kudayal river near their home, when the water breached its banks in Kerala’s tropical monsoon. “To catch the driftwood and coconut that came with the floodwaters,” Koshy remembers, indicating the risks the family’s precarious financial situation forces them to take.

On July 13, the family woke up to television visuals of the Amayizhanjan Canal where Joy, 47, hired temporarily as a sanitation worker by a contractor for the Indian Railways, had gone missing. It was a morning of heavy rain, and on such days, the 15-kilometre-long canal, believed to have got its name because it “crawls slowly like a tortoise”, attains the raw power of all the stormwater gushing into it from various corners of Kerala’s capital city.

Joy, along with two other temporary workers, had gone to clean a 117 metre-long, tunnel section of the canal which passes under the rail lines, close to the Central Railway Station in Thiruvananthapuram. Joy slipped and was caught in the floodwaters. His fellow workers tried to rescue him initially with ropes, but their efforts were overpowered by the fierceness off the water.

Over the next two days, the attention of the entire State was glued on this area, as Fire and Rescue Services personnel, scuba divers, and the National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) searched the canal. The struggle of the scuba divers to wade through the mounds of solidified waste inside the constricted canal as well as fresh loads of waste that kept pouring in, gave people an idea of the risks that sanitation workers like Joy take.

Although equipped with oxygen masks and other safety equipment, the divers were taking almost the same risk as Joy, the sanitation worker, to earn a living. Forty-six hours after he went missing, his body, caught in a pile of waste, was spotted by contingent workers of the city Corporation.

In the past decade, there have been three such accidents across the State and five deaths. Two temporary workers died in Kozhikode in 2015; an autorickshaw driver who tried to rescue them also died. Two more temporary workers died in Kozhikode this year. Joy’s is the fifth preventable death. He lost his life to a job that can be outsourced to technology in a city where citizens still throw their garbage on to the street and into canals, despite a waste disposal system.

Joy lived with his mother Melhi in a dilapidated, one-room house behind the one where his brother Koshy’s family lives. Koshy’s wife died less than two months ago, battling cancer. The family was still grieving for her when news of Joy’s accident came.